"Ship Hotel Foundation at Grandview Point," by Richard A. Stoner, was taken after the fire that leveled the Route 30 landmark. It's part of a solo exhibition, "Mountain Suite: Highway Across the Alleghenies," at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg. Click photo for larger image.

"Mountain Suite: Highway Across the Alleghenies" comprises a series of black and white photographs by Richard A. Stoner that peer into the soul of the gently rolling landscape traversed by Route 30.

While the old route, also known as the Lincoln Highway, and its environs have caught the fancy of countless artists, attention has generally been focused on scenic beauty or the roadside oddities that flagged tourists before the advent of tunnel-vision freeways.

Photographs of three of the latter -- the "Coffee Pot," "Dunkles Gulf" of Bedford, and the late "Ship Hotel"-- from 1989, are included with this recent body of work. Colorful, large and celebratory, they allow the subject to do all of the talking.

Other interpretations of these and similarly charming structures, flavor the exhibition in the main galleries, "Along the Lincoln Highway," which Stoner's work complements well.

But for the most part, his images eschew the easy fix and gaze intensely into the land, forged in geological time that has more staying power than the fleeting mortals who occasionally occupy its surface.

Contact prints keep the scale intimate, drawing the viewer near, and re-create spectacular detail that intensifies the illusion of realistic encounter.

The Grandview Ship Hotel, which became legendary in the nascent automobile age, is barely a footnote to the story of the rise that gave it its name. It's evident in "Ship Hotel Foundation at Grandview Point" that the crumbling concrete pillars and charred tree trunks, mute witnesses to the fire that felled the structure, will soon be obscured by foliage, but there's much yet to be written in the mountain's chapter.

Stoner exhibits two other images from Grandview, a place of personal memory that the artist first experienced at age 10 when traveling with his father on an "epic, cross-country camping journey." Similar experiences of discovery imbues these scenes with nostalgia for many visitors.

Man's presence is more intimately joined with the land, and more permanent -- if not as immediately apparent -- in "View towards the Flight 93 Crash Site from the Lincoln Highway," taken last year. Because of the historic event that occurred there on Sept. 11, 2001, the unremarkable grassy fields have gained the significance of generally more visually sublime sacred spaces.

Stoner also takes the less-traveled path when selecting what of the built environment to document. While the "Coffee Pot" is a natural, it will take the distancing of a few more years before the "Highway Drive-In, Latrobe, PA" or "Shirley's Motel, Ligonier, PA" develop similar fanciful appeal, although I believe they will.

In his artist statement, Stoner cites the accomplishment of the preeminent 19th-century photographer William Henry Jackson, and compares the storm-devastated landscape of "The Allegheny Front South of the Lincoln Highway" with George Barnard's images of Civil War battlefields. (Both of these are represented in the excellent "Eloquent Vistas: The Art of 19th-Century American Landscape Photography" that, along with "Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art," closes at Carnegie Museum of Art tomorrow.)

No stranger to the history of photography, Stoner elaborates upon formal and cultural characteristics of the medium to make a visual statement that builds new structure upon a firm foundation laid over the past century and a half.

"Mountain Suite" and "Lincoln Highway" run through May 30 at 221 N. Main St., Greensburg. Barbara Jones, exhibition and museum curator, will give a free gallery talk, "Along the Lincoln Highway," at noon Wednesday. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays and until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Suggested adult admission is $3, children under 12 free. For information, call 724-837-1500 or visit www.wmuseumaa.org.

Be an artist

If you have a computer or library access to one you can participate in "Everyday Art Assignments," a spiffy, inclusive, well-designed and thought-provoking participatory Web-based project conceived by artist Cheryl Capezzuti. Completed assignments, designed by 14 artists, will be displayed in a public exhibition coinciding with The Sprout Fund's Hothouse '04 Showcase in June. Special awards will be given to people completing all 14 projects. To learn more, go to www.everydayart.org.

Artists talk at SPACE

Michael Picarsic, Lorraine Vullo and Lauren Elmer, who are exhibiting in "Pin Up" at SPACE, 812 Liberty Ave., Downtown, will give free public talks from 1 to 3 p.m. today at the gallery. For information, 412-325-7723 or www.spacepittsburgh.org.